Oct 19, 2009

I have a penchant for picking up famous titles. Of course, when I actually pick them up, I vaguely remember that the books are famous for some reason. The only reason is perhaps that publishing houses are rather active nowadays in splashing the name and author of a new book before it’s out in the market. So that’s how I ended up picking up this book. I was also in for a pleasant surprise when I discovered that the author was a Pakistani and not an Indian Muslim as I had assumed. I have always been eager to try and discover cultural nuances and similarities among our geographical neighbours and I feel that books are one small way towards achieving this goal.

Ali Sethi is a young writer
albeit an experienced one. Of course in my opinion, some writers have inborn
talent and the remaining few manage to reach desired levels after years of
cultivation of the habit. It’s difficult to compartmentalize Sethi in such
specific divisions but he has the sparks of talent.

The protagonist Zaki
Shirazi is perhaps the only male character in spotlight and in the entire
duration of story telling, he even appears dwarfed by the female characters
around him; his mother Zakia, Daadi (paternal grandmother), cousin Samar Api and
servant Naseem.

People usually have this
wrong notion that working women are the only ones who exert their personality
and housewives are an example of docility. None of Zaki’s women, who are
housewives (except for his mother) really rebel against tradition but they are
firm in asserting their own rights wherever required. Whether it is Daadi
refusing to stay with her wily mother-in-law, Samar exerting herself in her
relationship or the servant Naseem who manages to buy a wagon for her son or
wangle a trip to Mecca, these women refuses to be bullied by
life. However, Zaki’s mother is the real heroine. And as according to the
author’s extracted quotation of the Prophet, Paradise lies at the feet of the mother.

Taking difficult decisions
on her own, bringing up Zaki as a single parent, and running a progressive
women’s magazine, she might also be expected to impart a similar liveliness to
her son as well. And this is probably where Sethi disappoints. Zaki doesn’t seem
to have a definite personality as expected from a protagonist. Instead he
absorbs life’s nuances as they come upon him, unlike his female relatives who
fight their way out. This might also be an extension of Sethi’s view of
preferred male behaviour where according to Zaki’s Urdu poetry spouting teacher,
the men should know their place and observe modesty just as the women should.
And this tone runs throughout the entire story.

Another peculiarity of The
Wish Maker is that Sethi mentions a lot of big events – the India-Pakistan
partition, different elections and regimes in Pakistan but he
just touches upon them. One can know little of the impact of these life-changing
events on the story’s characters because even they comment very little on them.
The best part of the book is the way different time-periods are interspersed
and almost glide towards completing the whole story ; and of course the
climactic last line ” ..your Amitabh has
arrived”.

Overall it is a nice read
but somehow I still feel I didn’t learn much about the Pakistani culture, or is
it my biased mindset which expects a whale of differences between the two
countries that probably are still as similar as they were before the night of 15
August 1947.